Children of Gaia
by Aaskada
Summary: There are only so many places safe from the Heartless and when the Gaians disappear from all of them it leads to panic and confusion. Meanwhile, Gaia has found a new home and She is doing Her best to be ready for the next assault. (Drabble series)
1. Hollow Bastion I

**Disclaimer:** The author owns neither FFVII nor KH.

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><p>Cloud disappears first, but no one notices because Aeris and Sephiroth are gone shortly after. Then Tifa follows, and Cid and Yuffie. It's about a month according to the weird, post-Heartless calendar that they're keeping when everyone else meets at Hollow Bastion and admits that it's been a week since the last time they saw any of the Gaians. King Mickey is first to express his worry.<p>

"There's nothing we can do, just keep an eye out," are the word that Leon ends the meeting with.

Ultimately, it's true. There is nothing to be done until they find more information. Everyone agrees to look, but every planet has it's oddities and Gaia's is the sentience of _the planet itself_. Not to mention the Goddess, Minerva; the Cetra; WEAPONs; and summons. For all they know this could be related.

During the meeting it gets established that no one there actually knows if Gaia every really got overrun by the Heartless. Rikku asked why else they would have been at Hollow Bastion, Traverse Town, and the Colosseum before they point out that Gaia was also one of the few planets with experience with pre-Heartless space travel-not to mention hostile extraplanetary lifeforms. That's still not a good enough reason for them to have been around, but it's the best they've got and, really, so many things could be a result of the _sentient planet_ and they just don't have enough information.


	2. Gaia I

It was a sentient planet thing.

Gaia called and Her champion answered the call first, followed by Her last ambassador and Jenova's son. The last of Her children took longer, but soon enough they came, too. She gathered them into Her and gave Herself over to Omega so She could go to Her newly chosen home. She must be careful, but She makes it and pulls this new planet around Her as Her armor. It takes Her time to fit it to Her and to fill its cracks, but soon enough it's as comfortable as Her old throne. Then She takes Her children and places them in their new homes.


	3. Gaia II

Leon goes with the group that's investigating a new planet. It's rare that they find one not overrun by the Heartless, but it happens sometimes and if the inhabitants are unaware of the danger, they need to be warned. The surface is strangely empty of cities. The first time they find something resembling a modern city it's on the coast in a desert with cliffs in the distance. There's something about that description that seems familiar, but he can't figure out what.

The city is more like two distinct camps that happen to be next to each other. Apparently they look as baffled as they are, because a townsperson stops them.

"You look confused. Never been here before?"

"No," Sora answers cheerfully. "Can you tell us anything?"

"Midgar is the town closer to the cliffs, it's controlled by ShinRa. Edge is the town by the water, controlled by AVALANCHE. AVALANCHE split into two factions a few months back. There's the extremist group that's at war with ShinRa and the main group that's not, but it's pretty clear they don't like ShinRa much either. The big group works with WRO and Cosmo Canyon, though."

"Thanks!"

"No problem," the man says. "Stay out of trouble, alright?"


	4. Gaia III

In Midgar there are wanted posters up for people named Elfé, Shears, Fuhito, Kanos, Kyneugh, and Tierce. Each poster has a red skull and crossbones with an 'A' between the eye sockets. These are probably the extremists.

Around town they see people in black suits who are watched warily by they people, one of them looks amazingly like Axel and carries a nightstick that he rests against his shoulder. There's also a group in blue uniforms carrying rifles patrolling the streets, each wears a helmet and green scarf that makes them indistinguishable from each other. The last group is what gets them—they've got to be SOLDIER because they're wearing the same uniform Cloud wore and they're carrying enormous swords around, which means they've found Gaia.


	5. Gaia IV

Seventh Heaven is busy mid-afternoon. The whole place is full except for the one table in the corner where AVALANCHE sits when they're all there. Vincent is lurking there with Cid and Barrett at the moment. Cloud went out to make deliveries to Kalm and would be getting back soon. Tifa mans the bar with years of expertise, but they've gotten so popular that she's hired a few of the older orphans to help her out. Their names are Julia, Arik, and Louis and they can all hold their own if a fight starts.

There isn't a fight, but there are strangers. They look surprised to see her behind the bar and they clearly recognize Cid, but she's never seen them before in her life. Lucky for them one of the tables clears up as Arik herds the drunks out of the bar and tells them to go home.


	6. Gaia V

It's luck that they've ended up in Seventh Heaven. They just chose a place that looked popular and went in, only to see Tifa behind the bar and Cid at a table with two imposing men they don't recognize. That makes them wonder where the others are, but they can't ask because it's obvious that neither recognizes them. Instead they sit down at a conveniently cleared table. Sora and Riku get a raised eyebrow, but no one objects to them being there. One of the waiters drops a menu on the table for them. The prices are all in gil, but the coins are probably different from the ones from his SeeD salary he's been carrying around out of habit. They're gold, though, so it'll probably be fine. Hopefully.


	7. Gaia VI

It's been about an hour since the group of strangers came in when Cloud gets back. She can recognize the sound of Fenrir approaching and relaxes a bit a knowing he'll be there if anything happens, but when she sees the looks on their faces when he walks into Seventh Heaven and tenses up just enough that he knows something is wrong.

Cloud doesn't say anything, just scans the bar and assesses the situation like he always does and then nods to her as he heads to the door behind the bar that leads to the kitchen. He leaves the Fusion Blade upstairs with the paperwork from his deliveries, but she can see the glint of materia made to look decorative and knows that he always carries a knife these days. He doesn't wear the sleeve anymore, not since geostigma got cured, and it just makes people more likely to assume that he's unarmed. Not that anyone would attack him, anyway. He sits with the three others at the corner table where he can watch the eclectic group at the table in the center of the room without being too obvious.


	8. Gaia VII

In the end the group orders their food and leaves without causing trouble, though they do pay with weird coins that Tifa only accepts because their gold and labeled to be varying amounts of 'gil' on the backs. They are there for a few hours though, before they head out. Vincent discreetly tails them and reports back that they had gone through Midgar to a small, strange-looking airship hidden near the wasteland cliffs.

It's not quite enough to call a meeting, but they make sure everyone gets a message on their PHS—including Reeve, Zack, and other non-AVALANCHE people they're friendly with. It'll get back to ShinRa if only because Zack would tell the other SOLDIER firsts. They don't like it, but they've gotten used to that.


	9. Traverse Town I

They go to Merlin with what the team at Gaia has told them. There are memory spells that could be cast, but from what they can tell it seems like people had been brought back to life, too.

"A planet could certainly be powerful enough to cast such spells, especially one such as Gaia that stores the memories of all beings that lived on its surface," he mused. "That could also be responsible for the lack of memories. The planet might be able to adjust memories of those under its power."

"Then we can't really do anything, can we? The planet is too powerful."

"Possibly, possibly. But Gaia might remind them. We cannot force anything that the planet cannot override, but that does not mean we cannot work to make allies of this planet."


	10. Gaia VIII

There are a lot of things about Gaia that are unexpected or in direct contradiction with the things they'd heard—First Lieutenant Hewley being in possession of the Buster Blade, the relative sanity of Sephiroth, and Cloud's status as technically a terrorist among other things; but Leon had experience being technically a terrorist and this isn't the first experience he's had with time travel. One day they might have a chance to figure out what was going in. Until then they have to figure out houw to deal with the numerous complex relationships between the varying factions on Gaia.

They're contact with Hollow Bastion meant that their allies knew Gaia had been found and that none of the Gaians remembered anything about the Heartless. No one was sure what to think of that, but according to Merlin there wasn't really anything they could do about it.


	11. Gaia IX

She knew She had visitors. The group of five were not Her children, but they knew Her children had known them. They could help against the Darkness that approached Her surface and threatened Her children and Her legacy. Minerva watched over Her chosen and also cast her eye over the visitors.

"It would be best if they had some of their memories of the Darkness," the goddess told Her frankly. "Even altered those would greatly help their chances in the coming conflicts."

**TIMEPASTGONE**

"Yes, I suppose it is. To change that now would be difficult."

**GUESTSHELPSTRENGTH**

"They could, but Your children are suspicious of them."

**TALKREASONKNOW**

"If You think so. The ambassador would be most reasonable, and Your champion would listen to her and the others to him."


	12. Gaia X

Cloud was suspicious of the visitors in town. The group passed between Midgar and Edge easily enough and showed no signs of caring how dangerous the ShinRa forces could be. They took down the monsters in the wasteland with ease and with weapons that no one recognized. He wasn't the only one who was suspicious; the entirety of the Department of Administrative Research knew nothing about them and if that wasn't suspicious, nothing was.

Aeris had been in the church all day with her feet in the water—touching it made a person's connection to the lifestream exponentially stronger, which was how Gaia could heal geostigma with it and also how a person could go into the water and resurface in a mako pool in Mideel.


	13. Hollow Bastion II

"Leon's calling again!" Rikku shouted across the command center.

Everyone scrambled to get closer to the workstation, even as she turned the volume up. The speakers spat feedback for a second before settling.

"We're listening," she said into the microphone. "How's it going?"

"We talked to Aeris yesterday and she said the planet had told her we could be trusted. She'll try to convince AVALANCHE to listen to what we have to say." He sighed. "It would help if we didn't have to talk to every group individually. There's ShinRa, AVALANCHE, WRO, Wutai, Cosmo Canyon, and most of them refuse to cooperate with each other."

"Do your best," Tidus said as he leaned over. "We all know how important it could be to secure another safe zone."


	14. Traverse Town II

The bar that Cid had run in town was dark and empty all the time now. It wasn't boarded up or damaged in any way, but the door was locked all the time and it was getting dusty inside.

Without Cid or Yuffie around the area seemed a lot quieter. They hadn't been the loudest people around, though sometimes that was a close call, but they were some of the liveliest. People still wandered by to get a drink or have a talk before remembering that no one was there anymore. Even Seifer had been caught looking oddly at the empty bar.


	15. Colosseum I

The battles between Sephiroth and Cloud had long become the main attraction at the Colosseum. With both of them and Aeris' calming presence absent, the fighting arena was drawing fewer and fewer visitors. For nearly two years people had trained and fought their way through their other opponents just to get a chance at one or the other of the pair. A few die hard fighters and some hoping to test their skills and luck were keeping the place going, but the Colosseum was losing spectators with the fighters. The betting pools were quiet and mostly empty for once. It was as close to a ghost town as it had ever been.


	16. Gaia XI

SOLDIER First Class was a group of seventeen people—only a tenth of the total members of the elite force. There were three times as many seconds and the pool of thirds was twice the size of that of the seconds. In total there were one-hundred and eighty-two SOLDIERs keeping an eye out for anything odd about the visitors to the Midgar-Edge area, accompanied by the thirty-six TURKs and three-hundred and twelve infantrymen stationed locally and the small army of cameras and robots that watched over the area.

Beside the ShinRa forces, WRO was also keeping watch. The WRO contribution consisted mostly of advanced AIs in the forms of small, unobtrusive animals like cats and birds.

If they slipped up, someone would catch it.


	17. Gaia XII

Cloud went talk to Aeris and neither left the church for six hours. When he came back, he called a meeting of the AVALANCHE commanders that was held via video call.

"Aeris said She said they could help us with the Darkness."

"Darkness? The hell is that?" Barrett demanded.

"I don't know." Cloud sighed and dragged his hand through his hair. "Apparently She wasn't very specific."

"How the hell are we supposed to fucking fight the damn Darkness if we don't fucking know what the hell it is?! Shit!" was Cid's contribution.

"Whatever is coming," Reeve said in his usual placating tone, "I'm sure we'll be prepared when the time comes."

One by one they said their goodbyes and rang off until it was just Tifa and Cloud in his office.


	18. Gaia XIII

All of the visitors looked around at the church, but Leon was the one who noticed the strangeness in the way the building was worn and collapsed in places. This new Gaia had probably been around for only a month or two their time, yet the building looked centuries old and there were signs of old battles in the smashed pews and broken stones.

Aeris was on the other side of the pool of water that dominated the altar-area with Cloud and Tifa standing behind him with the dark, red-cloaked man they still didn't know the name of. The four of them were arguing, though the stranger somehow managed to make several strong points, the details of which he was unsure, without saying a word.

"She wants to talk to him," Aeris insisted.

"Then let Her," Cloud said.

The blond shoved him into the pool before he could react and the water was dragging him down.


	19. Gaia XIV

"Squall Leonhart," the tall woman said, "I am Minerva, herald goddess of Gaia. I apologize for the unfortunate abruptness of our meeting, however Her champion has never been the most...tactful of people."

**EFFICIENTFASTURGENT**

"I'm sure—" she said to the voice, then to him, "She is in possession of an understandably inhuman disposition. I am afraid that She rarely remembers to consider the frailty of such races. He is more aware than She, but often less patient."

Leon took a moment to wonder if that was an insult before worrying about the strange not-voice that had spoken. He couldn't even be surprised she knew his name. Sentient planet, indeed.


End file.
